John Woolman

John Woolman was an American merchant, tailor, journalist, Quaker preacher and early abolitionist who lived from 1720 to 1772. Based in Mount Holly, New Jersey, near Philadelphia, he traveled through the American frontier to preach Quaker beliefs and to advocate against slavery and the slave trade, cruelty to animals, economic injustice and oppression, and conscription, and beginning in 1755, with the outbreak of the French and Indian War, he urged tax resistance to deny support to the colonial military. In 1772 he traveled to England, where he urged Quakers to support the abolition of slavery. He published numerous essays, especially against slavery, and kept a journal throughout his life that was published posthumously as The Journal of John Woolman in 1774; included in the Harvard Classics since 1909, it is considered a prominent American spiritual work admired for the power and clarity of its prose by non-Quakers including John Stuart Mill, William Ellery Channing and Charles Lamb.